What's the Point of Life? Happiness? Success? Or Something Else Entirely?
And can sobriety help us get there?
I just finished rereading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was one of my favorite books in middle school, but it had been over two decades since I last read it. I went into the reread with somewhat low expectations. After all, how well could a book that I loved in middle school hold up after so many years? But, I was surprised and happy to discover the book was just as great as I remembered it being.
In case anyone hasn’t heard of it, the Hitchhiker’s Guide is a sci-fi comedy. It parodies a wide variety of science fiction, including, most directly, Asimov’s famous Foundation series.
[Spoilers ahead!]
One of the book’s main plot points centers around a computer designed to discover the answer to “life, the universe, and everything.” After seven and a half million years of working on the problem, the computer comes up with a simple, elegant, and completely nonsensical answer: 42.
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